Tin 356 Distlers three of them Red, Blue and Turquoise

[88cs]

I have three Distlers ranging from needs some restoration to nearly perfect. Let's start with the nearly perfect one. The box is very hard to believe that it is 50 years old, the staples are shiny. I don't know much of the provenance of it, I do know there was a re-issue at one point, but I don't know how to tell them apart. Distler number two has a beat up box, but it looks the same, and on the boxes and cars it says, "Made in Western Germany". If anybody has a definitive way to tell remakes from originals I'd love to know, but I do believe these to be originals, I'm just having a bit of a hard time with the condition of the box and the car. The small amount of provenance I have is the previous owner, he had a lot of vintage models, all authentic. (Models are not my area of expertise).

So here they are. All cars have keys and all components, the turquoise one car one of the taillights popped out and I bought another but have not installed either. They are in a baggie. It's almost like there is a trick to it and I don't want to break anything . The red one is nearly perfect, as is the box, and I have an original battery for it. I also have new batteries for all the cars that I picked up last time I was in Germany, I have not tried to run the cars, I don't know how and again don't want to break anything.

Blue has a beat up box, though the base is better than the cover. It has one area that the floor fastener is separated from the body. I'm pretty sure that if you know how to do it you can clip it back together, but I don't want to take it apart to find out. (Charlie White has a page on his web site about restoring these, he talks about the fasteners and how to access them but doesn't show how he took it apart). Turquoise has two fasteners like this.

I am asking $650 for Red, $500 for Dark Blue and $300 for Turquoise, all US delivered. If my pricing is out of line I'm all ears about that, too, I don't have anything to compare them to, but I try to follow the forum rules.

My email is cs8815 at aol dot com, if you need a picture of something I'll be happy to take it.

As with all my things, if you buy one and don't like it for any reason I'll be happy to take it back for a full refund including return postage.

Here is Red-

[88cs]

Blue-

[88cs]

Turquoise-